Earlier this month we shared the news that a compilation entitled Still Wish You Were Here was being released.

With a star-studded lineup featuring Rick Wakeman, Ian Paice, Todd Rundgren, Geoff Tate, Joe Satriani, Steve Hackett, Steve Hillage, Edgar Froese, Tony Levin, James LaBrie, Bootsy Collins, Rat Scabies, Jah Wobble, Carmine Appice.

With a release date of May 28th, 2021 AFG Correspondent Richard Hobo has been on hand to very kindly write a review ahead of the release later this month.

STILL WISH YOU WERE HERE –VARIOUS ARTISTS
By Richard Hobo

Part of the beauty of music is that listening to a good album evokes the memories of when you first heard it and I’m happy to say that the tribute album Still Wish You Were Here, featuring a wide variety of musicians has the same ability to transport me back to the mid-seventies when the original album was first released.

Personally, I found it particularly mind-blowing that the bass lines of Roger Waters were now being played by King Crimson and Peter Gabriel bassist Tony Levin,(who also features on tribute albums for The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall), PiL’s Jah Wobble, Megadeth’s David Ellefson and even Funkadelic’s Bootsie Collins. I don’t think anyone saw that coming. Even David Gilmour who has admitted that his “fingers were never designed to go fast” must be curious to hear just what Joe Satriani and Steve Stevens have done with his guitar parts

The album opens with Shine On You Crazy Diamond, now featuring a flute and some blazing guitar work, which sets the tone for the rest of the album. A mostly respectful rendition of a much-loved album with some additional flourishes here and there.

There are a couple of clunkers, however, the worst one being Todd Rundgren inflicting the American two-syllable pronunciation of “Jagwar” upon us on Welcome to the Machine, as opposed to the “correct” three-syllable English version of “Jag-u-ar.” I couldn’t care less about which is right or wrong in the grand scheme of things, but in a song, missing out a syllable means missing out a beat. Even Taylor Swift, who is as American as apple pies and slammin’ screen doors manages to sing Jag-u-ar in one of her songs.

The other spider in the soup happens during Have a Cigar, where the last syllable is left off the line “Now I’ve always had a deep respect and I mean it most sincerely,” making it, “Now I’ve always had a deep respect and I mean it most sincere,” which, of course, turns the whole line into a complete nonsense. A case of misheard lyrics perhaps? Maybe, but Wish You Were Here has only been out for 46 years and sold millions and millions of copies, all of which had lyrics in the packaging, so really, there’s no excuse for getting it wrong.

Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Parts 6-9) is probably the best musical rendition of the whole album. Rod Argent, Steve Hillage, drummer Ian Paice, and bassist Bootsy Collins captures the feel of this song and, for me anyway, evoked lazy summers of my youth spent staring at the pictures on the original gatefold sleeve and wondering about where those trees were, trying to find the naked woman in the red scarf, wondering how they got the burnt corner of the front cover photograph and the sand falling out of the back cover.

This is not a note-perfect rendition of Wish You Were Here, because we’ve already got that; it’s more of an honorable tribute. Overall, it sounds like a collection of musicians gathered together in a barn grooving to one of their favorite albums. At times it made me yearn for the original and the vocals are probably the weakest performances. For instance, no one can replace Roger Waters on the vocals for Shine On You Crazy Diamond, not even David Gilmour, and the absence of female backup singers is certainly notable. King Crimson saxophonist Mel Collins plays some bang-on sax work, which is probably not surprising as he played on Roger Waters’solo albums The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking and Radio KAOS and their subsequent tours in the eighties, as well as Waters’ In the Flesh tour in 2000.

There are other Floyd connections, as the man who replaced Waters on bass on A Momentary Lapse of Reason, Tony Levin also features and plays a great bassline on Welcome to the Machine. I had a bit of a chuckle when I saw Megadeth bassist Dave Ellefson was involved, as any real Pink Floyd Nerdist will know, one of the names Pink Floyd was called before Syd Barrett came up with The Pink Floyd Sound was The Meggadeaths.

It’s worth noting that most of the musicians involved in this album are not far off the ages of the original Pink Floyd members and while it must be quite satisfying to have your peers pay homage to your work in such a grand and serious fashion, personally I can’t wait to see what the next generation of young musicians makes of the works of this great band.

Our sincere thanks go to Richard for sending us this wonderful review